American Horror Story - Season 2AU E1 - Asylum
by leaftheweed
Summary: Episode 1: What would Season 2 be like if it involved the characters from Season 1? This AU is a new, painful twist on the idea. Enter the Asylum world through the eyes of the author who brought you Season 1.5. This horror fic is NOT for the faint of heart. Written in the style of the show so brace yourself for plenty of Mature content that might give you nightmares.
1. Chapter 1 - Asylum

_This story is a completely Alternate Universe version of **Season 2**, infused and tweaked and written to include characters from the first season. It is completely independent and isn't intended to coexist with anything you know of the original Season 1, Season 2, or my own Season 1.5. It's a huge what-if that is set a few years ahead of Season 2's timeline and will mostly disregard what happened in Season 2. If you've read my Season 1.5 then you already know what kind of abuse I'm likely to heap on you. If you haven't read my stuff before, please see my Profile before reading so you get the full Warning before you see something that might traumatize you._

* * *

**Aug. 1, 1968**

_People are strange when you're a stranger  
Faces look ugly when you're alone  
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted  
Streets are uneven when you're down_

_When you're strange_  
_Faces come out of the rain_  
_When you're strange_  
_No one remembers your name_  
_When you're strange_

The song by The Doors floated from a small radio perched on a planter outside of the school. Tate hummed absently along with the tune as he passed by. He trotted up the wide stairs to the central building, moving with a purpose. The gym bag on his shoulder was heavy; its woven straps cut into his shoulder despite the thick wool coat between them and his skin. The coat was an old Civil War frock coat, something that had been in his family since long before Tate was born. It was too big for him but he liked it none the less.

He was still humming as he ducked inside the building and headed for the elevator, politely thanking the woman who powered it up for him. Once the elevator reached the highest floor it could access, he exited and began to climb the winding stairs that led up the interior guts of the tower. As he hurried up the steep steps he was distantly amazed that he didn't feel winded at all. The potent drugs in his system had given him energy to spare and had temporarily alleviated the headache that had been pounding in his skull for the past couple of weeks.

The reception area was empty when he entered but when he went to barricade the door to the stairs he saw a pair of red-headed twin boys coming up the steps. They were wearing similar striped Polo shirts and looked at him curiously. Irrationally he figured they knew what he was up to and, without thinking further than that, he reached in the gym bag and pulled out his sawed-off shotgun. He shot one then the other, each boy taking severe damage to the head and neck before tumbling down the stairs and out of sight.

Tate stowed the weapon in the bag once more and shut the door. He quickly shoved a heavy brown couch in front of the door and crossed the room to the far door. He stepped out onto the observation deck, into the shadows of the huge clock above. The air was cold up in the balcony-like enclosure. The clock tower offered an amazing view of the campus below.

Tate set the gym bag down at his feet, noting a scuff on the toe of his otherwise pristine combat boots. Military-style, they complimented the black BDU pants he wore. He fished out a pair of binoculars, knocking a small can of Spam aside. He had brought it in case he got hungry but he knew now that wouldn't be an issue. He felt nothing. No hunger, no fear, no anger; just a blank sort of calm.

He lifted the binoculars and looked out at the autumn world below. Though the tool brought the people into sharply detailed focus, Tate had never felt more separated from them than he did just then. They were like ants. Phantoms.

He dropped the binoculars back into the bag and drew out the carbine rifle he'd brought with him. The scope on it afforded him the same close-up view the binoculars had. He took aim. A gentle squeeze of the trigger and the young woman in his scope dropped. The man beside her crouched down to see what was wrong with her - she was pregnant and he thought perhaps she had swooned on account of some baby-related activity. Tate shot him next and he went down too.

He shot two more people - a man and a woman - and tried to shoot a second woman who ran to try to help them. He missed the moving target. The young lady ducked behind a flagpole and didn't emerge so Tate moved on to the next target. He continued to fire on every moving person he found with the scope and, when he ran out of targets on the college campus, he shifted his firing line to the street beyond.

Systematically the blond 19-year-old picked off pedestrians on that street and, since the scope and range of the weapon allowed him to, he moved to the next block. When that street was clear of moving targets he swapped his weapon for the next fully-loaded rifle and moved to the other side of the observation deck and started all over again.

It was harder to hit people on that side. They had heard the shots and were trying to hide from him. But the scope of the weapon and Tate's keen perception allowed him to gun down even those who had ducked behind cars and in one instance a man who thought he was safe behind a low wall.

The teenager had no sense of time but it was roughly 20 minutes later that return fire came from below in the form of police who had moved in. Tate had to duck down to avoid being shot himself, an action that kept him safe but limited his range drastically. He began to fire on those he could find that were shooting up at the clock tower but he couldn't see how many there were - or that some of them had made it to the central building.

The door to the observation deck slammed open behind him and he turned to face a hail of police gunfire. He was shot several times and the world went black.

The next thing he knew, Tate was on his back, strapped to a gurney being rolled roughly across the concrete commons. The wheeled stretcher was rushed past the same planter Tate had passed when he entered the clock tower earlier. The radio was still there only now it was blaring out the Beatles' tune 'Helter Skelter'.

Tate smiled, blood on his lips, and lost consciousness again.

When he woke next he was heavily drugged, bandaged, and strapped down securely to a thin bed deep in the confines of Briarcliff Asylum.

...

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Author's Note:

Okay. Where to start? First: As you may have noticed, this is set in 1968. I'm ditching AHS' original timeline so forget all you think you know about that. It just won't apply here. Also, I know 'Helter Skelter' didn't come out until November of that year but I very much wanted it in my AU because the Manson Family used it as a basis for their Tate-La Bianca murders and it's Tate's vignette here (the character actually was named after said murders). Also, I know the Charles Whitman clock tower murders were in Texas, not Massachusetts, and they happened in 1966, not '68, but again: artistic license here. Like Season 1 assigned the Columbine shooting to Westfield, I'm assigning that tragedy to Mass. Oddly enough though, the clock tower shootings _did_ occur on August 1 - the same day I happened to write this. That was not planned.

Next. I know I promised some shorts for 1.5 and I am still intending to get more of those up but this idea hit me tonight during a storm and I just had to run with it. I have so many notions to work with that I know this will be more than a one-shot. I didn't mean to start a whole new season but then I never meant to write 1.5 either. I have no idea at this time how long this will be in the end. I figure I'll just do with it what I did with the last one and let it go till it's done. I hope you find it as interesting as my other fic. And if you haven't read that, it's complete so check it out.

Next time: I'll introduce you to some of the staff of the asylum and maybe some of the other patients. Maybe by then I'll have a good theme song for this season in mind.


	2. Chapter 2 - Something in Common

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**...**

**░A░m░e░r░i░c░a░n░ ░H░o░r░r░o░r░ ░S░t░o░r░y░**

**...**

Nora Montgomery was still in the prime of her life when she turned to the church after the loss of her family. Her baby, still an infant, had been stolen from his crib and murdered and his mutilated parts sent to his frantic parents. After that horrible event her husband Charles, inconsolable, had committed suicide. At least that's what the public story was. Nora knew differently; she had pulled the trigger on the gun that had blown Charles' brains all over the ceiling of his basement workroom. Only she knew it wasn't a suicide and she absolved herself of responsibility with the additional knowledge that he had violated the corpse of their darling child by sewing his parts to those of dead animals.

But it was far from a perfect ending. She suffered horrible nightmares and guilt. The church was her refuge and while it didn't protect her from her memories, it allowed her a second chance with a new name and a new identity. She was Sister Mary Eunice and her new mission in life was to cure the same sort of insanity that had driven her brilliant surgeon husband to the awful desecration of her son's body. She couldn't help Charles but perhaps she could save some other demented soul.

She had come to Briarcliff with the recommendation of Sister Jude. Sister Jude had been there when Mary Eunice had first taken up the veil and had held her hand - proverbially and literally - through many tearful moments of doubt and fear. Jude had been a guiding light and source of strict order that Mary Eunice desperately needed. The younger woman envied the senior nun's strength of purpose and confidence. She wished to be more like her in many ways. In some ways, though, the woman terrified her.

"Sister?"

The masculine voice drew Sister Mary out of her thoughts and back into the present. "I'm sorry, doctor," she said, lowering her eyes. She felt a flush of embarrassment heat her cheeks. "Sister Jude is visiting the new arrival right now. I don't expect it should take too long."

Dr. Harmon smiled. He was a handsome man, kind and forgiving. His hair was dark, like her husband's had been, but his eyes were a piercing blue where Charles' had been as black as midnight.

"Please let me know when she's done?" he asked in a genial tone. "I would like to speak with her as soon as possible."

She nodded and risked another quick glance at his face. She found him smiling gently at her. He was so different from the other doctors that roamed the halls of Briarcliff. They were often pushy; cold and cynical. Some were mean while others were condescending. Doctor Benjamin Harmon was a warm summer breeze compared to those starchy individuals.

Sister Mary watched him head up the long spiral staircase - the stairwell Sister Jude referred to as her 'stairway to heaven'. Crossing herself, she said a quick prayer for forgiveness to erase any impure thoughts she may have had regarding the man. Then she hurried off to busy herself with one of the mundane tasks that came with her position: Counting linens and bedpans.

...

For Tate, the days that followed the shooting were a blur. Twenty-eight days of nightmares and nightmarish reality blurred by. People flickered in and out of his gray world. Sometimes they spoke but he couldn't understand the things they said. There were times of bright light and then darkness swallowed the light for long periods. The room rocked and spun so much he had no idea where he was or when he was dreaming.

Then the world slowed down again. His first brush with consciousness that wasn't in a completely drugged haze came with voices speaking in low tones. It was the voices that brought him up from sleep, making it so he couldn't rest. But he found he couldn't fully wake either.

It was a strange feeling of being trapped inside his body. He wanted to open his eyes, to look around and ask questions but he just couldn't. He tried shaking his head, thinking maybe that would un-stick his eyes from the odd paralysis he was under. He could feel his head toss to the side and felt the cushion of a cloth-covered pillow.

Still the voices persisted, getting louder now.

"Looks like the sedation's wearing off."

It was a woman's voice, dry and humorless.

"How long did Doctor Pennhurst say it would take?" a man responded. His voice was soft but Tate could make out what he said.

"Less than an hour," the woman answered. "He wasn't specific."

"I don't think these things can be more specific," said the man. "Medicine, like the Lord, works in its own time."

Tate thought they were probably talking about him and that his body was still asleep. Based on what he heard he was under the influence of some kind of sleep medication. All he had to do, then, was wake up. So he focused on the task.

He discovered that he felt thirsty. Very thirsty. He wanted to ask for water but when he tried to speak nothing happened. He tossed his head again, one way and then the other. Trying to wake was like trying to swim against a strong tide. He didn't feel an urge to drop back into blackness but he couldn't quite get all the right signals to spread out through his body.

Tate found he could twitch his hand and he homed in on that. If he could just get another part of his body working, maybe the rest would fall in line. He kept moving his head and after an agonizingly long period he finally found the strength to open his eyes. They felt weird. Greasy. He blinked slowly and discovered he could move his toes a little.

"He's awake," the woman said.

Tate looked in the direction of her voice and saw two hazy figures in the shadows of the gray room he was in. There was little else in the room that he could make out. The two people came closer and he saw that they were both wearing black clothes. One he identified as a nun. After a moment he realized the other was a priest.

The priest clutched a rosary in one hand and wore a concerned look. The woman had a severe cast to her sharp-boned face and she wore her rosary around her neck. Her hair was covered in a white-lined black habit.

"Peace be with you," the priest said, waving the rosary over Tate.

The teen tried to move his arms and found that while he had some control over them now, they were bound securely to the bed with padded leather cuffs. Lifting his head a little, he could see his bare feet sticking out below the sheet. His ankles were likewise cuffed to the bed. Fear prickled inside him and he looked up to the pair for some sort of explanation.

They didn't offer him one.

"Our help is in the name of the Lord," the priest said quietly. He passed the rosary over Tate again.

"Who has made heaven and earth," the nun said in response. She stared relentlessly at the teen boy while the priest's dark-eyed gaze was one of pity.

"Lord, hear my prayer," the priest continued.

And the nun said, "And let my cry reach up to You."

Then the priest said, "The Lord be with you."

He touched the rosary to Tate's forehead. The boy flinched a little but he couldn't really move away.

"And with your spirit," the nun murmured.

"Let us pray," the priest intoned and he turned his eyes upward. "Look upon Your servant, Lord, suffering from sickness of the body and mind. Refresh the soul You have created so that, purified of this affliction, he may always remember that he has been saved by Your loving pity through Christ our Lord."

"Amen," the nun said.

"Merciful Lord," the priest continued. "Consoler of the faithful, we beg of Your great mercy that at our humble request You will visit this, Your child, lying on a bed of pain and come to him. Bless him so that he will have the strength to overcome his weakness and through Your aid he will be restored to health so that in the sure knowledge of Your goodness he will gratefully bless Your name."

"Amen," the Sister said again.

"May the blessing of almighty God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - descend upon you and remain always," the priest said.

The dark-haired priest lifted an aspergillum that was attached to his belt by a leather thong and sprinkled water over Tate's bound form with it. The cool liquid prompted another slight flinch.

"Amen," the nun said again.

Tate had wanted some water but the delivery left something to be desired.

"Where am I?" he croaked, finding his voice at last. His tongue felt sticky and his throat was raw.

"You're at Briarcliff Manor Sanitarium," the priest said as released the metal water shaker. "I am Monsignor Howard and this is Sister Jude." He inclined his head toward the serious-faced nun at his side.

"You were brought here by the authorities," Sister Jude said. "To convalesce and, once you're physically well enough, an inquisition into your sanity will be made to determine whether you're fit to stand trial for your crimes."

Crimes? Suddenly the clock tower came back to Tate in a flood of scrambled memories. It was too much to make sense of all at once. His head was starting to hurt again.

"I'm thirsty," he said, wincing. "And my head hurts."

"Sister," said the priest. "Please tell Doctor Pennhurst that he can come in now. And would you please fetch some water for our guest?"

Sister Jude didn't particularly want to play waitress to the bound young man but she couldn't refuse a direct request from Reverend Monsignor Timothy. She bowed her head in acknowledgement and silently let herself out of the small cell. The doctor was waiting on a bench outside the ward, examining his notes when she arrived. She let him know that his patient was awake then she headed back to the kitchen.

By the time she returned to the cell with a tin cup and small pitcher of water, the doctor was finishing up with his examination of Tate's injuries. The young man had been kept naked; clothing would have only been a hindrance in keeping him clean and changing his bandages while he was sedated. Apart from his injuries Sister Jude might have found him attractive except that his crime repulsed her so much she found it impossible to separate his physical form from the atrocities he'd committed.

Dr. Pennhurst, a tall with a balding pate, pulled the sheet up over the blond boy's still-trussed form and straightened.

"How is he, doctor?" the nun asked as she filled the tin cup.

"Coming along quite well," the man said. Unlike the nun, he could part himself from the enormity of the crimes the teen was accused of and focus solely on his physical state. "He should be exercised as soon as possible. He's strong enough and his wounds are closed up. Nothing too rigorous, mind you, but he should be up and walking to prevent atrophy."

"Thank you, doctor," the priest said. "Can he be integrated with the common populace then?"

"Indeed," said Dr. Pennhurst. "I don't see why not. You may wish to have him mentally evaluated first but it's my opinion it's safe."

"Excellent," said Monsignor Howard. "There are some other matters I would like to discuss with you if you have the time?"

The doctor nodded. "I have some time. What is it?"

"Sister, could you see that our guest gets his exercise?" said the Monsignor with a mild smile.

Sister Jude gave him another stiff nod and watched as the two men departed.

"Hey, if you're not too busy, I'd really like that water now," Tate said. He'd been waiting very patiently for a drink but he had his limit.

The nun's cold gaze found him. "Of course," she said in a deceptively kind manner.

She held the cup to his lips, tipping it just a little too much so that he was forced to take bigger gulps than he would have liked. When the cup was empty she set it next to the pitcher on the small sturdy cabinet bolted to the floor in the corner.

"So you're gonna let me up now, right?" the teen pressed. His fingers curled over the leather cuffs in anticipation.

"Contrary to what the Monsignor's polite words may have you believe," Sister Jude said, clasping her hands tightly before her. "This is not a hotel. You are not our 'guest'. You are a prisoner under our care until such a time as the court deems you fit to stand trial for your crimes. Until such a time, you are an inmate here - a patient to be rehabilitated. You will repent for your deeds even if you never go to prison for them."

Tate's brow furrowed. He couldn't tell whether the nun seriously believed that last bit or not. "My head still hurts," he said.

"I'm sure that will be factored into your daily medication," Sister Jude dismissed. But she noticed that his complaints seemed to only be coming when he was confronted with his evil deeds. "Right now it's time for you to get some exercise."

"Will I get some clothes too?"

"At Briarcliff, you have no rights," the nun said archly. "You earn everything - even clothing. You will be given a hospital gown to start. But whether you get to keep it, or upgrade to something better, will be determined by your behavior."

She went back to the door then and beckoned an orderly in. "Release him," she directed the tall, burly blond man. "We're taking him to the Common Room."

...

The hospital gown Sister Jude had referred to was more of a viewing gown and was only marginally better than being naked as Tate was escorted down the cold, dark corridors. The floor chilled his bare feet and no matter how he fidgeted with the shapeless gray smock it kept opening in the back. He was sure the orderly behind him was getting more of a view than he wanted.

"When can I get some pants?" he asked, trying to keep his tone light despite the fact that he was annoyed at the treatment.

"When you've earned them," the nun said without so much as glancing back at him.

She pushed open one of a set of large oak double doors inset with wire mesh-infused safety glass. The room beyond was large and had large windows set with the same sort of indestructible glass as the doors. They were also fronted with thick bars. Old couches and several tables and chairs were scattered about, some near the walls and some more centrally located. An old upright piano stood near the middle of the room. The air was hazy with cigarette smoke and an standing record player against one wall was playing a recording of Jeanine Deckers' '_Dominque_'.

The nun and the orderly abandoned the newest inmate to the general population of the room but Tate hardly noticed. There were so many people around and in so many strange states, he couldn't do much but stare. The first thing that caught his attention was a skinny old woman curled up under one of the tables. She was completely naked and the way she was lying on her side made her topmost breast sag down her bony chest like an empty sack. The sight of her shocked him and he wondered whether she was naked as a punishment or whether she'd simply shed her clothes of her own accord.

Not far from where she was, a man sat on one of the old couches making strange faces. His jaw stuck out at a weird angle and he kept twisting his mouth in wild contortions that made him seem toothless at times. Every now and then his face would relax and the man, who looked to be in his 50s, would appear almost normal. Then his face would contort again in a rubbery, bizarre way. He held both hands up and his fingers stayed locked in a stiff position like he couldn't relax them.

On the opposite end of the couch a younger man with a shaved head sat, rocking and rocking and hugging himself. He stared up at the ceiling slack-jawed like it was the most amazing thing he'd seen. Nearby stood a short, chubby older man who had one hand down his pants. He didn't seem to be doing anything with that hand; just holding himself in a socially inappropriate way.

Another couch across the room held three women, two younger and one older. One of the younger women was bowed down, hugging her own knees and not moving. The other two conversed and smoked cigarettes, ignoring her. The older woman had a beat-up old baby doll tucked into the crook of her arm.

Then there was the singing man. He was standing on his head with his back against one wall, his eyes closed. He was singing the same tune over and over, something praising the pope and the bishop and the cardinal and so on. Closer to Tate a man with a cigarette was talking animatedly to a man in a lab coat. Their conversation gave the teen something to focus on in the midst of the bizarre bedlam all around.

"I just don't see why I have to take medication," the man was saying. He had short dark hair and a healthy physique. "I'm not crazy. If I love my mom and my dad, that's not schizophrenia. That's normal. And here you are, forcing me to take this medicine like I'm some sort of crazy person. And I'm not."

"No one's forcing you to do anything," the doctor said in a benign way. He had square, thick-rimmed glasses that hid most of his round face.

"But you are," the patient insisted. He pulled a hard drag off the cigarette then waved it around dramatically. "I don't belong here. You know that. Everyone knows that. So why do I have to take your medicine? I don't need it and taking it is what's going to make me crazy."

"If you're in this place," the doctor said. "There's a reason for it."

"But that's just it," the patient said. For all his protesting, he seemed calm and rational to Tate. "There isn't a good reason. It's a conspiracy. The government wants me here to keep me under tabs so they can watch me. Is that fair? No. And neither is giving a sane man medication to make him insane. Where's the justice in that?"

"I don't have time to debate this with you, Harvey," the doctor said. "Take it up with your therapist."

"But I want to take it up with you, doc," the man identified as Harvey said. "You're the one dispensing medication around here. You're the one forcing me to take it."

The doctor didn't respond. He just walked away from the man. Harvey looked after him for a moment before noticing Tate watching. Then the dark-haired man put on a smile and headed over.

"Hey. A new face. I'm Harvey Wilmington."

He stuck out a hand which Tate shook, if hesitantly.

"Tate," the teen said.

"Nice to meetcha, Tate," said Harvey. "What're you in for?"

Tate shrugged, a motion that tugged his hospital gown open. He quickly tugged it closed again. "They say I'm crazy," he said. "Mind if I sit down?"

Harvey grinned. "Don'tcha hate those things? Now we know why doctors call 'em 'viewing gowns'."

He followed Tate to a table where they both had a seat, Tate carefully arranging the gown before settling into the hard wooden chair.

"You know, they say I'm crazy too," Harvey confided. He stubbed his cigarette out in a wide ashtray that sat on the table. "I'm not. But once you're in this joint, there ain't no getting out. You can argue till you're blue in the face and it won't mean shit to these jack-asses."

"You got a cigarette I could have?" Tate asked.

"Oh, sure," said Harvey amiably. He dug around in the front pocket of his gray-blue shirt and produced an orange-filtered cigarette that he handed over. Then he offered the teen a half a pack of matches. "Cigarettes're one of the few humanities they allow us in here. That and fruit cocktail."

Tate lit the cigarette and exhaled smoke. He hadn't smoked for very long but the familiar taste was soothing. "What do you have to do to earn clothes around here?"

"Keep your nose clean," said Harvey with a short chuckle. "Don't piss off the Sisters and they'll get you clothed pretty quickly. They don't like lookin' at bare man-flesh."

That made Tate smile a little. Then he glanced around the room again. "So what do you do in here?"

Harvey shrugged. "Play cards. Chess. Checkers. Try not to go crazy." He grinned crookedly.

The record ended and the needle on the player lifted and reset itself. The song started again.

"What's with the singing nun?" asked Tate, raising his chin in the direction of the old record player.

Harvey glanced over and made a face. "Sister Jude's idea. As long as the Common Room's open, the record has to play. I'm not sure if she thinks it soothes the crazies or if she's just tryin' to torture us."

Tate smiled. "She seems like a real hard-ass."

"Kid, you don't know the half of it," Harvey said with chilling sincerity. "Just don't get on her bad side."

"I think it's too late for that," said Tate. "I think she hates me already."

"Nah," said Harvey. "If she hated you, you wouldn't be in here."

Tate looked around the room again, bewildered by the amount of people doing strange things. He couldn't see how being in among all the insanity was a good thing.

"It can get worse," Harvey said quietly, reading his expression. "Believe me. You don't wanna find out."

Tate's expression cleared with a quick jolt of his brows. "If you say so," he said and tapped his ash in the wide ashtray.

The tall blond orderly who'd escorted Tate to the room came over to their table then and took hold of the teen's elbow.

"It's time for you to go see the shrink," the man said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Tate thought about objecting but then he realized leaving meant he'd be getting away from all the crazy people. So he got up. He had another quick puff off the cigarette then rubbed it out in the ashtray.

"See ya, Harvey," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette."

"Any time, kid," Harvey said with a little wave.

Tate let the orderly lead him away, once again marveling at the bizarre nature of the room's occupants.

...

* * *

Author's Note:

This chapter got a bit long but it was the best place I could find to cut it. The title is a play on words having to do both with Mary Eunice's thoughts and the fact that Tate was taken to the Common Room. Bad, I know, but I couldn't resist.

As you can see I'm doing some cross-season character use. I'm using some characters from Season 1, some from Season 2 and - as you've seen here in the form of Mary Eunice - some characters that are a blend. Keep a sharp eye; you never know who'll turn up.

Pennhurst is of the worst asylums that ever existed in the United States. A lot of the nastiness you'll see in this fic is inspired by that place. It was a facility where the insane were housed alongside people with other disabilities such as being an amputee. Some 'patients' started out as healthy teens whose parents simply wanted to punish them for not wanting to go to their college of choice. Through drugs, physical and mental abuse, just about every person who entered Pennhurst wound up a virtual zombie or a lunatic, even if they were sane when they went in.

Ironic note: The song playing in the Common Room was written by Jeanine Deckers, known as "The Singing Nun". She wrote several other songs but none so popular as that one. The irony? She and her 'companion' Anne Pescher later committed suicide together as a result of the tax problems and financial troubles that stemmed from recording the song.

Next time: Tate meets with the shrink. And if you haven't seen it, I've updated my Profile to include a playlist of songs for Season 2 AU. Check it out!


	3. Chapter 3 - Discoveries

...

Of the many offices assigned to the various staff employed by Briarcliff Manor, Dr. Oliver Thredson's was one of the smallest. He was the newest member on board and therefore the lowest ranked, entitled to the most meager of allotments - and trust. He fully intended to change both of those things but he was finding acclimatizing to the strict structure of the place stifling. Many of the longer-tenured doctors refused to even look at the possibility of treating the personality of the patient, preferring to cling to more traditional methods of addressing the body rather than the mind.

Looking at the case file spread across the scarred old desk under the wan light of the hanging lamp overhead, he knew that the Tate Langdon case was unique and needed to be dealt with as such. Dr. Thredson pulled a slow drag from his cigarette and peeled back pages of photographic evidence from the scene of the staggering crime: 42 people shot; 13 of them died.

The door opened and a tall, muscular orderly led Tate into the room, a hand on one of the young man's arms. He steered Tate over to one of the two wooden chairs in front of the doctor's desk and started to cuff him to it.

"That won't be necessary," Oliver said with a tolerant smile.

The orderly paused and gave him a funny look.

"Please," the doctor insisted. "If there's any trouble I'll call. You'll be right outside, yes?"

"Yes," the man in white agreed but he didn't sound like he thought it was a very good idea to leave the patient unfettered.

"Patrick, isn't it?" asked Dr. Thredson. When the tall man nodded, Oliver gave him another tolerant smile. "I appreciate your devotion to duty, Patrick, but I'm sure we can manage just fine here. Isn't that right, Mr. Langdon?"

Tate glanced up at the orderly towering over him then across the desk at the doctor. "Yeah. I won't bite. I promise." A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of his lips.

The orderly gave a little shrug then left the room, leaving the door ajar.

Dr. Thredson watched him go then shifted his attention to the blond youth seated across from him. "Is it all right if I call you Tate?"

"It's my name," Tate said.

"I like to ask," the doctor said. He snubbed his cigarette out and noticed the teen's intense scrutiny of the gesture. "Would you like one?" He shook another cigarette out of the pack on his desk and offered it to him.

Tate hesitated then took it. "Thanks." He hadn't smoked much before coming to Briarcliff but he was finding it incredibly easy to get them so he kept smoking them. The smell reminded him of home.

Dr. Thredson smiled and lit his Zippo lighter. He didn't get up though. In order to light his cigarette Tate had to rise and bring the white papered stick to the flame. Once it was lit, Tate sank back into the chair, visibly more relaxed than when he'd first been brought in.

"So, Tate," said Oliver, folding his hands on the desk once he'd put his lighter away. "Do you understand why you're here at Briarcliff?"

Tate sucked on his cigarette for a silent moment, dark eyes unreadable. Finally: "Yeah."

"Do you remember what you did?" prompted Dr. Thredson.

Again there was an elongated pause while Tate nursed his cigarette. "Sort of."

Oliver had expected resistance so the brief answers didn't faze him. He simply shifted tactics. "You left a letter behind at your mother's house before you went to the college." He rifled through the various papers and pulled out a photo copy of the letter in question. "Was this intended to be a suicide note?"

Tate frowned. When he'd written that letter, he hadn't expected to ever see someone else read it. When he didn't answer, Oliver glanced at the young man briefly.

"It says here that you were 'thinking strange thoughts' before the shooting," said the doctor. "You wrote that you'd been having severe headaches for several days." He lowered the letter then and looked at his patient. "What sort of strange thoughts were you having?"

Tate didn't want to talk about his inner thoughts with a stranger. "I don't know, doc. Maybe I was thinking about shooting some people."

"Why?"

"That's a stupid question."

"On the contrary, it's a very valid one," said Dr. Thredson, unruffled. "You were making good grades. Your family wasn't impoverished. Folks who know your family say you had a good relationship with them. Why did you want to shoot people?"

"I don't know," Tate flared, suddenly irritated. He leaned forward and smashed the cigarette out in the ashtray hard enough to make the round container bounce.

"Why are you angry, Tate?" Dr. Thredson pressed.

"Because you're asking me bullshit questions," snapped the blond teen. "I'm crazy, right? That's why I'm here, isn't it? Because I'm a crazy fuck who did something crazy."

Oliver settled back in his chair and considered the young man. "No. You're here for me to determine whether you're insane or a simply a cold-blooded killer." He paused significantly then. When Tate didn't respond he arched his thick brows above the dark horned rims of his glasses. "About your headaches... How often would you say you have them?"

Tate turned his attention to his bitten-down fingernails and picked at some dead skin. "A lot. More over the past couple weeks. Pretty much constantly."

"Is that why you took the Dexedrine?"

"Yeah," Tate said, annoyed that the doctor knew so much about him. He sat up a little more to try to see what all the guy had on his desk. There were a lot of papers there. It was impossible to know at a glance what all he had on Tate. "I thought maybe it would help."

"Did it?"

"I don't know. No. I guess not."

Oliver shuffled through his papers again. "You were raised Catholic, weren't you?"

"Yeah," Tate said, caught off guard. "Why?"

"You were... an altar boy and a Boy Scout - one of the youngest in your troop to achieve Eagle Scout rank, in fact."

"Yeah. So?"

Dr. Thredson continued to study the papers before him. "The leader of your troop... Michael. He was involved with your church. Studying to be a priest at the time, wasn't he?"

Tate didn't like the way the doctor was asking so many questions and answering none. So he decided not to answer any more. Two could play that game.

Dr. Thredson didn't need an answer; he already knew it thanks to the papers he had. "Was he a close friend?"

"He wasn't touching me, if that's what you mean," Tate said, forgetting his plan to stay silent.

Oliver looked across the desk at him steadily. "Why would you think I meant that?"

Tate stared him down, then said abruptly: "Can I have another cigarette?"

"Certainly," Dr. Thredson smiled. He pulled out another cigarette and again lit the Zippo. "I was asking because I understand you took the name 'Michael' as your Confirmation name."

Tate kept a close eye on the man as he leaned in to light the cancer stick. He exhaled smoke as he sat back down, smoothing the hospital gown before doing so.

After a few silent moments, when it was plain Tate wasn't going to say anything, the doctor said, "Can you tell me why you shot all those people?" He lit another cigarette for himself.

"I don't know," said Tate with a sharp shrug of one shoulder. He shifted in his seat. Then he revised his answer. "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

Tate sat forward then, expression intense. "You ever... Have you ever looked out at the world and realized there just aren't that many people out there? I mean _real_ people. Not these... fucking. Meat puppets. Blank-eyed soulless bastards just going through the motions. Shallow... easy-listening cogs of the world. Hollow people. Selfish, self-serving do-nothings that give nothing. That are nothing. All they do is take and then they have the balls to think they're better than you. Even though they're not."

He looked for some sign of understanding from the man seated on the other side of the desk or, failing that, perhaps confusion or revulsion. But Dr. Thredson just looked the same as he had before: Tolerant and open.

Irritated again, Tate sank back in his chair. "Lots of assholes go through life on auto-pilot, not using their brains and still they get ahead in life because other losers just like them are paving the way for them. Making laws and rules so those jerk-offs can get ahead while real people get held down. Forced to play by those rules even though they're a hundred times better than the jerks that made them."

"You believe you're smarter than most people," the doctor said. It wasn't really a question but a gentle statement instead.

"I don't believe it," corrected Tate. "I know it. In fact, I don't know why they say 'average' when it's pretty obvious most people really aren't as smart as that."

"I'd like to hear more about the 'strange thoughts' you were having," the doctor prompted as he tapped his ash. "Before the shooting. What sorts of thoughts?"

"I don't know," Tate hedged, leery of the subject. "Just strange shit. Like maybe... maybe most people would be better off dead. I thought about killing my mother."

"Were you angry with her?"

Tate tipped his head thoughtfully. "Nah. Not so much. I mean, sometimes I am. But not like... I hate you, I want you to die. I just didn't want her to be embarrassed by the fallout of all this."

"So you thought you would be doing her a favor?" Oliver was fascinated by the glimpses he was getting of Tate's inner psyche. "So... why didn't you kill her then?"

"I decided she deserved a little discomfort," Tate grinned. Dimples showed in his cheeks, making the smile a charming one despite his words. "For being such a shitty mother."

Oliver looked down at the papers scattered over his desk. While he could tell there was a lot more to that subject with the young man, he decided to leave it for the time being. "Tell me, Tate. Do you hear voices in your head?"

"Doesn't everybody?" Tate's smile grew. "I mean... isn't that what your conscience is? A voice in your head telling you what's right and what you should feel bad about?"

The doctor smiled though this time it was to mask his need for a moment to think. He knew going into this meeting that the young man was smart on paper: He'd made good grades and scored exceptionally high on an IQ test as well. But Thredson was beginning to see a manipulative side to that intelligence in how Tate kept successfully blocking him from probing into the most important areas of his psychological foundation.

"Did your... conscience tell you to shoot those people?"

Tate's smile withered. The fact was he had several internal voices but he didn't consider them to be in line with the classic shrink idea of 'hearing voices'. Likewise, he knew the inner dialogues he'd had that led him to the shooting weren't from some outward source but stemmed from within. But he didn't trust Dr. Thredson enough to explain himself.

"What happens if I say I do hear voices?" he asked in a casual way, probing the doctor's reaction.

Oliver pulled a last drag off his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. "There are one of two things that will happen after this meeting when I file my report. If I decide you're of sound mind, you will go to trial for injuring and killing the people you shot. If I decide you're not, you will be kept here at Briarcliff for continued assessment and treatment."

Tate also snubbed his cigarette out; it had burnt down so low it was melting the filter and putting off a noxious stink. He sat back in his chair and ran both hands through his hair, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. Prison, the asylum; it made no difference at the moment. They were one and the same to him. The only thing that stood out was that the doctor was the first and only person he'd met so far that actually seemed interested in what Tate thought of the world he was stuck in.

"It's not like... _Hearing_ voices," he said, weighing what he wanted to say before saying it. "I don't hear it with my ears like a sound. It's all in here." He touched his temple. "Like... There's a me-voice that sort of talks about everything I see and hear. It's what tells me to do things like watch TV or change my clothes. A lot of times I have music in my head. Songs I hear. Once I had one stuck in there that played over and over for a week. I'd go to sleep with it in my head and I'd wake up and it would still be playing. God. That was the worst."

He decided he'd said enough and gave a soft laugh. "But everybody has inner thoughts like that, right? I mean. How could we function without thinking about what we're doing?"

"To a degree," the doctor allowed. "But there's a difference between thinking about getting ready for work and having an internal voice that tells you to go kill people."

Tate's jaw set and he folded his arms. "I'm tired of talking about that."

He expected the doctor to debate the matter or to try to force the issue but the man just nodded. "That's all right, Tate. I think we've had a good, productive chat." He raised his voice then to call: "Patrick. Please come back in."

The door opened all the way and the orderly stepped back inside.

"Please escort Tate back to his room," Dr. Thredson said in a mild tone. Then he said to Tate, "It was nice meeting you. We will be seeing each other again soon."

Patrick took hold of Tate's arm again and urged him up out of the chair. At the doorway the teen dug in his heels, twisting to look back at the therapist.

"What're you gonna tell them, doc?"

Oliver smiled gently. "When I've made my complete diagnosis I'll let you know. Don't worry. You won't be kept out of the loop."

Patrick tugged the blond youth out of the office then, leaving Oliver to survey the spread of papers again. He lit another cigarette and slipped a sheet of paper into the old typewriter on his desk. Setting his diagnosis into print was incredibly easy; he hadn't even needed to take notes. The signs were perfectly clear and, after a lengthy description of his evaluation, he summarized it neatly at the bottom of the page.

Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia.

...

After his meeting with the doctor, the orderly took Tate back to the ward where he locked him in his room. The man returned shortly bearing a tray with food on it and two cups - one metal and one clear plastic. The plastic one had something clear in it that Tate took to be water.

The orderly, Patrick, set the tray down on the little cabinet and took the clear cup, which he held out to Tate. "Drink this."

The teen took it and sniffed it. It had a funny smell. "What is it?"

"Just drink it."

"And what if I don't?"

The tall man's brows raised. "If you want to keep that hospital gown, you'll drink it."

Tate gave him a flat look. "You're a real jerk, you know that?"

"That's what they pay me for," said the orderly. "Now drink it."

Holding his breath, the blond youth gulped the stuff. It tasted awful but he got it down. He grabbed some bread off the tray and hastily ate it, hoping it would wipe away the aftertaste. It only helped a little.

The orderly chuckled and left, taking the plastic cup with him. Tate glared after him then turned his attention to the rest of the meal. It was a macaroni and mystery meat in tomato paste concoction. He sniffed the contents of the other cup and discovered it to be plain old water. He drank that down in a couple of big swallows. The macaroni stuff was mushy and bland but by the time he finished it, the bitter aftertaste was mostly gone from his mouth.

He was trembling by then. He felt funny on the inside, jittery and smothered. He went over to the bed where he collapsed. The world spun around him. He thought he could hear voices out in the hall but they were hollow and distant and indistinct. Tate tried to sit up but he was too shaky to even prop himself up against the headboard.

The weird shaky effect lasted a long time despite his attempt to sleep it off. He had no idea how long it had been before another orderly came to herd him out of bed and into the hall. Disoriented and wobbly-kneed, Tate made it out into the hall where he was mercifully allowed to sit down. He kept his back to the wall outside his cell and watched while the man locked the door. There were other inmates out in the hall already and the man went to each cell and flushed everyone out, the same as he had done to Tate, locking the doors behind him.

Everyone in the hall was male; there were no female inmates in the ward Tate was in. Distantly he reasoned that it made sense but he couldn't fathom why it did. His brain wasn't cooperating with finer thought points. He drew his knees up and folded his arms over them, then braced his forehead against them. The only thing he took comfort in was the fact that his head was so jittery, it didn't have time to hurt.

...

A little over an hour later the orderly came back to unlock the rooms again. Tate was feeling a bit less strange but everything still had a hollow, hazy feeling to it. He didn't understand the purpose behind locking and unlocking the doors. He knew some people had come and gone while he had his head down but he didn't know who or why.

Unnerved by the whole ordeal, he went back to his room. He flopped on the bed once more. The room wasn't spinning any longer. The light outside was growing wan, reddish in the late afternoon. He heard whispering outside the doorway of his room but when he lifted his head to look, there was no one there. So he put his head back down.

He must have slept because the next thing he knew, he was waking up. Someone was in his room. Opening his eyes, he saw it was Patrick again. He had another tray of food and two more cups, one of them clear plastic.

Tate groaned when he saw it and pulled the blanket up over his head.

"Yeah, it's that time," the man said, sounding amused. "Come on out and let's get this over with."

"No," Tate said. It was more of a whine than anything.

"I don't want to have to make you drink it," said the orderly.

"Then don't," Tate reasoned. He pulled the blanket down so he could peek out at the man in white. "You don't have to."

"Actually I do," said Patrick. He was right beside the bed. He'd set the tray down but he had the clear cup in his hand. "It's part of the job description: Medicate patients. You're a patient here and this is your medicine."

"It's not medicine," said Tate grumpily. "It's poison. It made me sick earlier."

"It isn't poison," the man reassured.

"How would you know? Have you taken it?"

"No," Patrick said. "I'm not a patient here and I'm not one of the staff who samples the drugs."

Curiosity overcame Tate's reluctance to cooperate. "Are there people who work here who do?"

"Maybe," said the orderly. "But that doesn't matter right now. What matters is that _you_ take it."

Tate had hoped to hear something interesting. Disappointed, he sat up and looked at the cup. Then he looked up at the man holding it. "Come on, man," he pleaded and tears shone in his dark eyes. "Please don't make me take that shit. It really messed me up. I felt like I was dying."

The orderly wavered, not entirely immune to the pleas of a desperate young man. He glanced over a shoulder, then looked back at Tate and sighed.

"All right," he said in gruff tone despite his permissiveness. "I'll let you slide this once but tell _anyone_ and you'll be sorry."

"I won't tell a soul," Tate promised, vastly relieved. "Thanks, man. I owe you."

"Yeah," said the orderly. "You do. Now eat up. Someone else will be around in about a half hour to collect your tray."

"Why not you?" Tate was suddenly reluctant to deal with another person now that he knew this one could be managed, if only a little.

"I'm off after this," Patrick said. "Night shift takes over then. Enjoy your dinner."

With that he took the still-full cup and left. Tate dug into the uninspired supper with enthusiasm brought on by his narrow escape from further drugging.

...

Lights out in the men's ward was a study in contrasts: It was dark but from the small barred window in the door and the heavily reinforced window above the bed slices of light cut through the blackness. There was just enough illumination to wash everything in a bluish tint, making the shadows hazy around the edges and prone to shifting if one didn't keep a sharp eye on them.

Beyond his locked door Tate could hear the sounds of other inmates coughing or talking to themselves. One was singing; Tate suspected it was the same guy from the common room who'd been standing on his head.

The teen wasn't tired but there was nothing else to do so he stretched out on the bed and pulled the thin blanket up. The singing was bothering him. He tried pressing the pillow over his ears. It helped but only a little.

There was nothing he could do about the noise or in general. So he did the only thing he could. The hospital gown provided easy access - the only bright side he'd found in the ill-fitting item of clothing. He tried to think of something erotic while he masturbated, to pull himself further away from the confines of the cell but the cot squeaked when he got a good rhythm going, distracting him. He didn't need fantasy though. It was simply a convenience.

He was just starting to detach and lose himself in the pleasure of the moment when a bright light shone through the little window of his cell, right on his face. He brought his free hand up to shield his eyes and squinted in irritation at the intrusion.

"Hands above the sheets, Tate," Sister Jude's voice came from behind the glare of the flashlight. "We don't allow that sort of behavior here."

"Eat me, you old bat!" Tate snapped, annoyed at both being caught and being told what to do.

The light blinked away and for a moment he thought she'd left. Then he heard keys jingling in the lock of the metal door. He pushed himself up, half-sitting.

"Out of the bed," the nun commanded. She had a thin cane in her hand and a dark-haired orderly with her who held the flashlight that had so recently spotlighted the patient. "On your knees. Face on the bed."

"What?" Tate blinked.

"Carl?" Sister Jude flicked her free hand and the white-clad orderly snatched the thin blanket away.

Tate curled up reactively, his irritation and outrage shifting to uncertainty with a touch of fear. He didn't understand what was happening.

"Out of bed!" the nun barked and brought the cane down on the mattress next to his leg so sharply it made a cracking sound as wood met cloth.

Tate's heart raced. He could see the orderly tensing up, his ham-hands flexing. He could tell the guy would pull him out of the bed if he didn't do as he was told. Not wanting to be manhandled, the teenager got up. Sister Jude put a skinny hand on his shoulder and shoved him down hard. He resisted a little but then dropped to a knee.

"You'd best bend over that cot," she said in a voice that was pure ice. "Unless you want to be cuffed to it."

It was a nightmare, Tate told himself. It had to be. Nothing real could be this bizarre. He knelt and bent over the bed, hands propping him till she shoved him down all the way so that his face was against the musty-smelling mattress.

"This is a place of the Lord," the nun said sharply. "Acts of perversion are forbidden and will not be tolerated."

With that final remark she brought the cane down. The viewing gown offered no protection as it had succumbed to gravity's pull when he'd bent over. The thin wood cut into his skin, causing him to bite his tongue to keep from yelping in pain.

Tate had been spanked before; his mother believed in a strict upbringing. But those moments of discipline were nothing compared to being caned. The black-robed woman didn't give the matter her full strength but the pain was still a shock to his system. He managed to keep silent as the first few lashes struck his ass and the tops of his thighs but when the cane started to hit areas that had already been covered, he couldn't help crying out in pain. After fifteen strokes with the wooden instrument of torture, he felt her hand leave his back.

"Get back in bed," she said harshly, her tone one of irritated disgust. "And pray for forgiveness."

He pulled himself back up onto the cot, wincing when his striped skin brushed the thin mattress. He was forced to lay on his side where he quickly tugged the shapeless hospital gown down to hide the wounded area. He didn't have to worry about anyone seeing his boner; the whipping had effectively taken care of that problem. The orderly scooped up the discarded blanket and tossed it at him. Tate didn't catch it exactly but he quickly spread it over himself.

The nun and orderly headed for the door, with Sister Jude pausing on her way out to look back at him. "I have little tolerance for disobedient boys," she said archly. "You will obey me or you will suffer the consequences."

She left and he heard keys in the lock again. Tate tried to shift his position to a more comfortable one but there was no getting comfortable. His backside hurt too much. It felt lacerated; on fire. Gingerly he ran his fingers over one area and felt hot, angry welts. Even that light touch brought more pain.

He shoved his hand under his thin pillow to provide better support for his cheek and tried to process what he'd just been through. The orderly hadn't seemed at all shocked or disapproving of the treatment. In fact he'd seemed rather... blank. Like it was all part of the routine. Embarrassment trickled in over Tate's confusion and misery. He wished he'd managed to stay silent during the harsh treatment; to take it 'like a man'. But even under his mother's hand he had never managed to be stoic. He sniffled and discovered with annoyance that his eyes were trying to leak.

Down the hall Tate heard Sister Jude's sharp voice raised to say something to another inmate and then the ward was silent. The singing had stopped. Tate was sure the other patients had heard what had happened in his cell. No one was anxious to be the next person under her cane.

Sleep was a trial that night. Every time Tate tried to roll over, fresh pain would wake him. In between fits of wakefulness his dreams were bizarre and hard to comprehend, filled with fear and dark places and people who wanted to hurt him.

At one point he dreamed a young girl was trying to lead him out of the asylum but before they could reach the front door, Sister Jude caught them. She had three large dogs with her that she set upon the girl and while they were tearing her to pieces the nun put a rope around his neck and led him to an empty cell deep in an abandoned portion of the Kirkbride-style sanitarium. There she tied him to the wall and left him. Even though his hands were free, he was too intimidated to even try untying the rope.

When he woke from that dream, he was frustrated and angry with himself but underlying that was a sense of fear he'd never known before.

...

* * *

Author's Note:

As mentioned before, I've changed things up with this AU. Thredson isn't contracted here; he's a full-time employee. Also, you'll notice there are a few more orderlies in my fic than in the show. I'm planning to keep the cast of characters small but I had to have more muscle. The way that the inmates will be treated is based on what actually happened in some of the worst sanitariums in America. And with as violent and crazy as some of the patients are, there'd be no way they'd put up with the treatment if it was just one-on-one all the time. Someone would beat Jude to death if she didn't have someone there to stop them.

Oh. I guess that might be considered a spoiler. Sorry. But I wanted to explain that now, so you wouldn't be wondering later.

I listened to the _"Directions to See a Ghost" album by The Black Angels_ during the writing and editing of this chapter. Next chapter: Tate finds out what the doctor's verdict is and Ben wants at the new patient.


	4. Chapter 4 - Doctors

...

The next morning Dr. Harmon found his way to the kitchen thanks to tips from some of the lesser-ranking nuns in the asylum. They'd told him he could find who he was looking for there and he did just that.

"Sister Jude," Ben smiled at the nun as he approached the table where she was overseeing some of the more reliable patients shaping buns from pre-kneaded dough. "I've been looking for you."

The older woman turned a critical eye on him. "I'm a very busy woman," she said. She'd heard from Sister Mary Eunice that the doctor wanted to speak with her but she hadn't made it a priority to give him her time. "What is it?"

Not to be put off by her brusque attitude, Ben said, "I wanted to speak with you about the prisoner who was brought here. Tate Langdon?"

Sister Jude huffed a short, derisive laugh. "What about him?"

"Well, I was wanting to meet with him."

"Why?" The nun eyed him again, more keenly this time. "He's already seeing a doctor."

"I understand that," said Dr. Harmon. "But you have to agree his is an unusual case. I would like a chance to-"

"Pick his brain and see what makes him tick," Sister Jude finished his sentence for him. She dusted flour from her fingers and fixed him with a stern look. "This isn't a sideshow, doctor. It is a place of redemption and rehabilitation. Tate Langdon is already under a psychiatrist's care. If you want to be involved in the young man's 'treatment' you'll have to speak with Dr. Thredson."

Ben felt a prickle of irritation at her swift dismissal. "You wouldn't object though?"

She folded her hands and the thinnest smile appeared on her pale lips. "No. But then I don't believe any of you 'shrinks' can help him. What that young man needs is spiritual cleansing."

Dr. Harmon stared at her for a moment, incredulous. He thought she was joking but in the admittedly short amount of time he'd known her, he'd never heard her joke - about anything. "And what sort of cleansing do you propose, Sister? Caning? Dousing? Trial by fire?" He tacked on a smile so the words would lose a little of their insulting undertone.

"You have your methods," said Sister Jude, eyes flashing angrily. "We have ours. And mind the egotism, doctor. Pride goeth before the fall."

She turned away from him then and went back to monitoring and correcting the methods the patients were using to shape the bread. The conversation was effectively over but Ben had gotten what he wanted - at least he'd gotten one step closer to his goal.

...

Keys jingling in the door woke Tate. He had no idea what time it was but the cell was brighter so he reckoned it must be morning. Patrick brought in a tray of what looked like scrambled eggs and toast. Tate was relieved to see there wasn't a clear plastic cup of liquid on the tray. Instead next to the metal cup this time there was a short plastic dish that held pills in it.

"Breakfast," the orderly said.

"No poison today," Tate noted.

The comment earned a hint of a smile from the man as he set the tray on the cabinet. "No, not today," he said. "Your doctor wants you taking these instead of the standard." He tapped the pill container. "Enjoy."

Then he left Tate to examine the contents of the tray. The meal was unappetizing at best. He picked up the little plastic cup and poked a finger in it to stir the pills around. There was a smallish round white one, a round blue one, big oblong gray one and a clear yellow blister pill. He thought the white one might be a painkiller but he wasn't sure about the others. What he was certain about was that he wasn't going to take what he didn't know.

Cautiously he sniffed the contents of the metal cup and, when he was satisfied that it was just water, he took the white pill with a gulp from the cup. The liquid was indeed water and it tasted like the metal container it was in. The other pills he held onto as he looked around the room for a place to hide them. The room was small and very short on furnishings. Apart from the cabinet and bed, there was a lone chair and nothing else. He got up, wincing as his battered backside protested. It hurt to move.

Forcing himself to ignore the dull pain, he eyed his bed up and down. Pillow and case, thin mattress, top sheet and blanket. Not much to work with there. He glanced toward the window set into the door to make sure no one was watching then he stripped the linens off the bed, leaving them in a small pile. Then he went over the narrow mattress from top to bottom, even the underside. It was old and stained and he eventually found what he was looking for: A small rip in one seam.

Working quickly, he used his fingers to widen the rip. When it was big enough he shoved the three remaining pills into it. Once that was done he quickly replaced the bedclothes, not wanting to raise suspicion. By then the pill he'd already swallowed was starting to kick in. He'd guessed right: It was a codeine painkiller. He'd had enough of those in his time to recognize the effects. It eased his persistent headache and made the welts on his ass and legs less troublesome.

He ate his breakfast standing up rather than risk sitting on the hard chair. He finished all of the meal despite the fact that it was a far cry from home cooking. He was just polishing off the last of the toast when keys were at the door again. Tate pulled his hospital gown closed and looked over. It was a stout dark-haired man in white, one of the orderlies who'd subdued him the previous day.

"Doctor Thredson wants to see you," the man said.

...

"Please have a seat," said the doctor when Tate was brought in. He motioned to the pair of chairs before his desk.

Tate hesitated. Even though his pain had lessened, he wasn't sure sitting would work out so well. Oliver noted the hesitation and his bushy dark brows knit.

"Something wrong?"

"Nah." Tate forced a smile.

He lowered himself into a chair, trying to make the motion look easy even though he was attempting to be careful. It hurt to rest his weight on his backside so he perched on the edge of the chair, putting as little of himself in contact with the hard seat as he could.

The doctor stared at him. "What's the matter?"

"Sister Jude introduced me to her idea of... correction last night," Tate said, choosing his words carefully. He wanted to make it sound like it didn't bother him. "The old bitch really has an arm on her. They should lend her out to the Red Sox as a relief pitcher."

Oliver frowned. He had been at the asylum long enough to infer what the young man meant. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said with genuine sympathy. "What happened?"

He wasn't prying out of curiosity's sake; he wanted to be able to discuss the matter with the nun later and the more information he had, the better armed he would be.

Tate didn't really want to discuss it but it was a less sensitive topic than the punishment was. "I was jerking off."

"Oh," said the doctor with muted surprise. "I see."

He reached for his cigarettes and offered one to his patient. Tate took one and was grateful when Dr. Thredson got up this time to light it for him. The teen didn't want to have to get up and sit back down again.

"So what'd you want to see me about?" asked Tate. "Not me jerking off, I hope."

"No," said the doctor with a soft laugh. His expression got seriously quickly. "I wanted to let you know that I've made my diagnosis."

"And?" asked Tate, exhaling smoke slowly. It felt good to smoke the cigarette. Better than ever thanks to the painkiller.

Dr. Thredson gazed at him seriously through the horn-rimmed glasses he wore. "I believe you're suffering from paranoid schizophrenia following an acute psychotic episode. I've made my recommendation to the senior staff that you should be kept here indefinitely pending treatment."

Tate's expression collapsed slowly, working through a myriad of subtle looks before settling on muted outrage. Oliver thought he saw fear there as well.

"Kept here indefinitely? What's that supposed to mean?" the teenager asked.

The doctor hesitated, sensing he needed to handle the next few moments delicately. "Well. You're not fit to stand trial. Your perception of what is real and what actually is real aren't... aligned. It's my hope that with extended treatment we can help you learn how to cope with the way your mind works but..."

"But what?" Tate prompted, eyeing him.

Dr. Thredson had another drag from his cigarette then put it out though there was still more than half of it left. He wanted his hands free just in case. "Well. There's no cure for your condition. "

"What?" Tate was on his feet. "You mean you're going to keep me here forever?!"

"I didn't say that," said the doctor in a deliberately soothing tone. He rose as well, making slow movements so as not to set his patient off. "But it's realistic to acknowledge that you may never get well enough to stand trial."

"You can't keep me here forever!" Tate shouted, suddenly livid. After what had happened last night, the prospect of being trapped in the asylum for the rest of his life was overwhelming. He dropped the cigarette and slammed both fists down on the desk. "You can't make me stay here!"

"Tate, please calm down," Oliver said in his steady tone.

Two orderlies crowded into the room, drawn by the noise. Tate saw them and knew they were there to restrain him, an idea that didn't suit him in the least.

"You can't do this!" he yelled.

As they reached for him the young man ducked, weaving between their arms with amazing dexterity. He saw a chance and ran for the door and thought he might actually reach it but one of the white-dressed men tackled him just like a football player would. Tate hit the concrete floor hard, teeth cutting into his lower lip. He tasted blood.

"You can't keep me here!" he wailed, all dignity flown. Tears burned his eyes and blurred his vision. "I can't stay here!"

"Take him to the seclusion room," Dr. Thredson told the men in white, unable to keep the disappointment from his words. "Give him twenty-five milligrams of Librium. Put him in a straight jacket until he calms down."

The men hauled the struggling teen up from the floor. Tate yelled and kicked and fought as best he could but they were too strong and committed to getting him put someplace where he wouldn't be a threat to anyone.

As the patient's cries faded in the distance, Oliver marveled at how worked up Tate had gotten despite the combination of medication he'd been prescribed. Thredson would have to re-evaluate dosages and possibly the medication itself.

He sighed and picked up the cigarette Tate had dropped on the floor. The doctor put it out in the ashtray and wondered what his next step would be. He hadn't even gotten to the part about discussing treatment with his patient.

...

"Dr. Thredson?"

Oliver looked up from the papers on his desk. He had been so preoccupied with Tate's case file that he hadn't heard his door open.

"I hope I'm not interrupting," Ben said, coming all the way in.

Unlike Oliver, who wore a simple dark tweed suit and a plain black tie with a gold-tone clip, Dr. Harmon was dressed more casually in a navy blue turtleneck sweater and black slacks. His style and demeanor put Thredson in mind of the 50's beat poets.

"Is there something I can help you with?"

Encouraged, Ben came over to his desk and seated himself in one of the two wooden chairs before it. "We haven't had a real chance to talk," he said. "How are you settling in?"

A brief, humorless smile touched Oliver's lips. "As well as can be expected, considering the environs."

"It can be a rough adjustment for some," said Ben.

"Doctor Harmon-"

"Ben, please."

"Ben." Oliver offered another tight, brief smile. "Is there something you want?" He wasn't buying that this was just a social visit, no matter how casual and friendly the other man seemed.

Called out, Ben decided to dispense with the pleasantries. No sense beating around the bush if the other guy wasn't game for it. "I understand you've recently taken on the clock tower shooter as your patient."

The insight sharpened Oliver's focus and put him on guard. "Yes."

"How're things going with that?"

Thredson folded his hands on his desk. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."

"I heard you had to have him sedated earlier," said Ben. He was watching the other man attentively, a contradiction to the easy manner he projected with his body language.

"Yes, that's correct," said Oliver without stirring. "Unfortunately he had a bit of a meltdown during our session but he's under control now."

"Huh," Ben said, rubbing the short stubble that fuzzed his chin. "Well, if it'd help, I'd be happy to sit in on future sessions with you. Give you a hand."

"Thank you for the kind offer, Doctor Harmon," Oliver smiled tightly. "But I think it would be best for Tate right now if we keep things one-on-one. Gaining his trust at this stage is essential and I think having more people involved in his treatment will undermine that goal."

That response didn't please Ben; the warmth in his blue eyes cooled significantly. Still he smiled. "Well, I hope you'll reconsider," he said as he got up. "I've done ground-breaking work with psychotics and schizophrenics."

"I'll keep that in mind," Thredson said.

Ben lingered for a moment longer then said, "I'll leave you to your files. But let me know if you change your mind."

Once he left, Oliver let the fake smile drop. He didn't care for the other doctor's interest in his patient. He was used to running a private practice and didn't like the prospect of other therapists tinkering with what he considered to be his project. He lit a cigarette and looked back down at the papers on his desk, trying to decide how to proceed next.

...

"Something on your mind?" Vivien asked her husband at dinner. "You've hardly touched your food."

Ben forced his thoughts on the present; on his lovely honey-haired wife and her concerned smile. "There's a new patient at the asylum."

Violet suddenly found the conversation interesting. A bit Bohemian in style and spirit, she was an avid reader and followed current events. She already knew who her father was talking about.

"The clock tower shooter?" she asked, fork poised mid-air above the slice of half-eaten meatloaf on her plate.

Ben gave her a puzzled look. "You know about him?"

"Know about him, dad?" she said incredulously. "He's all over the news. Everyone knows about him... and where they took him. Is he your patient?"

"Yes and no," the man hedged. Tate wasn't his patient but he aimed to change that.

"Far out." Violet shook her head and stuck her fork in her meatloaf. "I should get a job at the hospital."

"What?" Vivien said, surprised.

"Why?" said Ben.

Violet looked around the square Formica-topped table at her folks. "Well, you both work there. Why shouldn't I? I could get a job as a candy-striper. Don't they have those at Briarcliff? Then we could call it the family business."

"No," said Ben, frowning now. "It's not a safe job for you."

"But it's safe enough for you and mom?" his daughter countered boldly.

"Your mother's only there a couple of times a month to present music therapy to the most stable patients," Ben reasoned.

"You're there every day of the week," said Violet, unmoved.

"I'm a man," he stated.

The response prompted an eye-roll from the teen. "You are so stuck in the fifties, dad."

"And I'm your father," he went on, not listening to her lament. "It's my job to look out for you."

"Yeah, right," the girl muttered and went back to carving up her dinner. It left him with a view of the top of her black beret. "Next thing you'll be telling me is I can't iron my hair. Way to be oppressive, dad."

"You know I wouldn't tell you that," he responded. "I'm not trying to stifle you, Vi. I just don't think it's safe for you there."

He looked to Vivien for back up but she just shrugged and dished out some more mashed potatoes. She didn't argue with him, though, and that was almost as good as agreement.

"Instead of thinking about a job," he said. "You ought to think about college. You're so bright, sweetheart, higher learning would be a cinch for you and open up doors to all kinds of employment opportunities later."

"Except the job I want," the girl grumbled.

Ben shrugged and dug into his dinner. The college subject was one they had gone several rounds over in the past. They would likely go several more in the future.

...

* * *

Author's Note:

True fact: Most mental hospitals back in the day would accept volunteers because the inmates outnumbered the medical staff. Some facilities even used prisoners as orderlies and guards.

Also true: You can still get into the medical profession by walking into places like dental offices and offering to sterilize tools for free. It's called 'field training'. It's basically like an apprenticeship and means more than any trade school education.

Next time: Tate meets some more of the crazies.


	5. Chapter 5 - Patients

...

Tate had no idea how long he was in the padded cell. The drowsy euphoria brought on by the injected drug combined with the painkiller he'd taken before made time meaningless. He lay there on the floor of the dingy seclusion room, drifting in and out of something like sleep. Thoughts bled into dreams and back into conscious thought again so seamlessly, he couldn't tell which was which.

At some point an orderly took him back to his regular cell in the men's ward. The black-haired man removed the white leather straight jacket but Tate was too drugged to care. He just sprawled on his bed and lay there for a long time. Eventually he heard rattling at the door. Lifting his head he saw someone push a dinner tray through the small slot in the door near the floor. The stuff looked a bit like beef stew. Tate had no appetite for it so he ignored it. A while later a staff member - a big black man - came to collect the tray and, seeing the pill cup still on the tray, picked it up and brought it over.

"Hey," the man said, nudging Tate roughly. "Take your meds."

The teen stirred and squinted at the man in white, not fully understanding what was going on. The man put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a hard jostle.

"Take your meds," the orderly repeated.

Tate took the cup and shifted a little, alert enough to grasp what was wanted of him. He could tell this guy was no Patrick. "Could I have some water?"

The stocky man turned to go grab the metal cup from the tray and while his back was turned Tate dumped the pills down the front of his hospital gown. He kept his fist closed, acting like he had the pills in his hand. When the orderly returned with the tin cup Tate pretended to take the pills all at once by pressing that hand quickly over his mouth. He took several gulps of the metal-flavored water, wincing at the taste in a convincing approximation of swallowing so many pills at the same time.

He passed both cups back to the attendant and collapsed onto the mattress again. He lay there for a long time after the orderly left before he stirred again. He fished the pills back out and, with some effort, got the bottom sheet up so he could stash the tablets in the mattress along with the ones from the morning. After he got the sheet put back he collapsed again and was soon asleep.

Weird dreams plagued him all night but when he woke in the morning, he couldn't remember any of them. An orderly brought his breakfast in. He'd seen the dark-haired man before but had no name to associate to him. Tate didn't feel like asking and the orderly wasn't chatty so the guy dropped off the tray and left without a word between them.

The food was like what he'd had the previous morning only this time the pill cup had some different pills in it. Tate examined them curiously. He hadn't bothered to look at what he was given with the evening meal he'd missed. He eventually ended up stuffing all but the painkiller into his mattress along with the rest.

His backside was feeling better, even before the pain pill kicked in. He took time after eating to examine the area as best he could without a mirror and grimaced. It looked bad; worse than it felt, with several dark red stripes bruising his pale skin. He quickly covered himself again, ashamed of the marks. It was a physical reminder of how helpless he'd been.

...

The door opened again and he was let out to be led first to the bathroom where the orderly watched him while he took a leak. Then Tate was led to the common room where that same song was playing on the record player again. There were only a couple of people in the room when the blond youth arrived: An old man who was sitting and drooling on himself and the guy who'd been singing the day before were there. The singing man wasn't singing at the moment, though. He was standing next to one of the windows, slowly banging his head against the sturdy mesh screen that covered it.

Unsettled, Tate found a spot on a deep red couch and sat down. It was more comfortable to sit on the soft cushion than one of the hard chairs would be. Slowly the room filled with other inmates, first just men but then women trickled in as well. Tate didn't see Harvey anywhere, which was a mild disappointment. He'd been hoping to ask the guy for a cigarette. He chewed his fingernails absently while watching the room.

Then a woman with dark brown tangled hair sat down next to him.

"Hi," she said with a smile that made her dark brown eyes look a bit unhinged. She looked to be in her mid-forties and had a dumpy physique beneath her asylum-issued button-down dress.

"Hey," he said around a finger.

"You're the new guy," she said, seeming proud of her knowledge.

"I guess," he responded, not sure what else to say.

"I'm Roberta," she said. Her face twitched. "What's your name?"

"Tate," he supplied.

"I saw you looking at me," she said.

He gave her a peculiar look. "I wasn't looking at you till you sat down."

"Don't lie," said Roberta, her smile fading. "I know you were."

Tate wrinkled his nose a little. He was about to deny it again when another woman sat down beside him, wedging herself on his other side between him and the arm of the couch. It put her in very close contact with him.

"He wasn't looking at you," she told the woman, smirking at her.

She had short blonde hair and was several years younger than Roberta but still older than Tate. He thought she might've been the woman he'd seen the day before who was talking to the lady with the baby doll.

"He was so," Roberta defended. "I saw him!"

"You think everyone's looking at you," the blonde woman scoffed. She grabbed Tate's free hand. "He'd rather look at me."

"Fuck you, Shelley," Roberta snapped.

Tate extracted himself from between them. He had to tug hard to retrieve his hand from the blonde woman. They both watched him go then fell to bickering between themselves about who had driven him away.

The commons were filled up by that point. There was no place to sit where there weren't already people and Tate would have preferred to be alone. Hugging himself and moving carefully so as not to make the hospital gown flap open, he moved to the only place where there weren't a lot of people: Next to the record player. From there he surveyed the room and was again awed and disgusted by the sheer insanity he saw.

Naked, wasted-away people, people swaying, people mumbling to themselves. Many were just sitting and staring. A guy over in one corner was puking and nobody was doing anything about it. When he finished he just wandered away from the vomit and still no one did anything about it. The orderlies that were lurking in the shadows near the exits were ignoring everyone and everything, just talking to each other.

It was enough to make Tate's skin crawl. He knew he wasn't as crazy as many of the hospital's residents but he was beginning to fear that living in this kind of climate might make him so. He looked over at the nearest window but the double layers of bars were incredibly discouraging. It wasn't a way out.

He looked around the room again and saw a guy who looked only a couple of years older than himself. The young man was sitting on one of the nearby sofas and held a small pad of paper that he was writing on a lot. His brown hair was neatly combed though greasy. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and a look of attentive focus. Taking a chance, Tate headed over to where he was and sat down near but not right next to him.

"Hey," he said. "Can I bum a smoke?"

The man looked up from his writing, assessed Tate head to toe, then shifted his pencil to the hand that was holding his pad of paper. He dug a pack of cigarettes out and shook one out for him. "Knock yourself out," he said.

Tate took one. "Got some matches?"

"Want me to kick you in the chest to get you started?" the other guy said. His tone was serious but there was a spark of humor in his green eyes. He put the cigarette pack away and produced a book of matches.

After he'd lit his cigarette Tate returned the matches and braved another question. "What are you writing?"

The man put the matches away then looked at his pad. "Notes."

"Why?"

The man looked at Tate for a moment before answering. "I'm doing research. I'm not actually supposed to be here. I'm a student at Boston University. I lied to get in here. My class is doing a study about how places like this can't tell the sane from the insane."

Tate wasn't sure whether to believe him. The seemed more stable than most of the room's other occupants. It was possible he was telling the truth but he could also be completely delusional.

The teen grinned at the bizarreness of it all. "I'm kind of finding it hard to tell that myself."

The man smiled. "Wait till you've been here a couple of months."

"I'm Tate."

"John," the man said. "What're you in for?"

"Fuck if I know," Tate lied and sucked on his cigarette. He'd decided he didn't want John to know what he'd done. The guy might not want to talk to him anymore and he was better company than the crazy bitches who were still bickering across the room. "I get these bad headaches and I guess that made them think I was crazy."

"Tough luck," John said sympathetically. "I've heard stranger tales. There's a woman in here - Betty - who was locked up because she wanted to move out of her parents' house. She was twenty-two when they had her committed. She's been through something like fifty ECT sessions. Batty as a belfry now."

"ECT?"

"Shock treatment," clarified John. "They took her away a few days ago. I heard they were going to give her a lobotomy."

"Lobotomy?"

"Yeah. It's where they take an ice pick and a hammer and..." John held his pencil up near the corner of his eye and made a tapping motion with the other hand. "Scrape the front of your brain away from your skull. Kills the nerves. Makes you a walking zombie."

"I know what it is. But why would they do that to her?" Tate said, appalled.

John hunched his shoulders in a shrug. "She got violent. All those shocks on a healthy brain... fried her good. She wasn't nuts when she came in here but she'll never get out."

"I heard nobody ever gets out of here," Tate said, bitterness leaking into his tone.

John crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on a nearby beat-up coffee table then dusted ashes off his pants where they'd fallen during his distraction with his writing. "I'll be getting out of here soon."

"How?"

"All I have to do is tell the doctor I'm insane and agree to take the anti-psychotic medication he wants me to and they'll release me."

"They're giving me meds but they didn't say they'd let me go if I took them," said Tate.

John pressed his lips together briefly, considering. "I'm guessing from what you said that we weren't admitted under the same circumstances. See, I came to the hospital voluntarily. It sounds like you were committed involuntarily."

That made Tate laugh. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. But if you came here willingly... I think you're crazier than I am."

The man chuckled. "Maybe," he said.

"So is this all we do all day?" Tate asked, giving the commons another broad look. "Just sit around?"

John was writing again. He didn't look up as he answered. "Mostly. If you're well-behaved you get more privileges."

"Like what?"

"Arts and crafts," said John. "Ceramics. Kitchen or laundry duty. Music. There are even some classes they offer for folks who might be able to work once they get out."

"Classes?" Tate said, nose crinkling. "Bad enough they have us locked up but they make you go to school too?"

John chuckled again. "Here it's considered a privilege."

"Yeah, like doing laundry," Tate responded with a grin. "Fucking sadists."

"You get bored enough, laundry'll seem like a treat."

"I doubt that." Tate finished his cigarette and put it out.

"Better than being stuck in here," John pointed out. "That lady you were talking to?" He tipped his pencil toward Roberta in a quick gesture. "Had five kids. She stabbed all of them to death and left 'em on the bed she and her husband shared. Said she was sick of having to 'do everything herself'."

Tate blinked and looked at Roberta. Sure she'd seemed strange but he wouldn't have pegged her for a child murderer. But the story made him curious. "You know about anybody else here?"

"Yeah, sure," said John. "I've learned almost everybody's story. Everybody who can communicate anyway."

"What about him?" asked Tate, pointing to a wiry guy with black hair who was playing checkers with a Hispanic man.

"The white guy's been in and out of institutions since he was a kid," said John. "He's got some crazy stories to tell about the shit he's seen. The guy he's with set his neighbor on fire because he thought he stole something from him." He tipped his pencil toward an older black woman who was sitting at one of the tables slowly rocking herself side to side. "She was a prostitute. They force-sterilized her at the last place she was at. Sent her here and she got the shock-and-lobotomy treatment."

"She told you that?" Tate asked, caught somewhere between horrified and amazed.

"No," John said. He lit another cigarette. "One of the other gals who knew her from there did."

"What about that girl?" Tate pointed to the blonde woman, Shelley.

"Nympho," reported John. "There used to be a few of 'em running around here after the women's home closed up but most of them have been shipped off to other places. Shelley's... well." He gave a short laugh. "She's incurable."

"What's a nympho?"

John grinned. "A chick who likes sex too much."

"Are they going to lobotomize her too?" Tate glanced briefly at the rocking black woman.

"I doubt it," said John. "Too many of the staff here like what she has to offer."

Tate stared at him. "Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack," John nodded. "Some of the staff here are worse than the patients. I've heard some of the orderlies were hired from the prison work release program. Just... Be careful what you do and say. The best thing to do is pretend to go along with whatever it is they tell you. Kiss ass, be polite. Are you taking any medicine?"

Tate didn't answer immediately, not sure he wanted to tell John the truth. The man might tell the staff. "Why?"

"I haven't seen you in the drug line," said John. "You've been getting stuff in your cell, yeah?"

"Drug line?"

"Yeah," the man said, tapping his ash in the ashtray. "If you behave yourself, you'll start coming to the cafeteria for meals and pills. They do drug line four times a day - once before every meal and once more before bed. When they give you the pills, just keep them in your cheek, away from your saliva. Then when you can, go to the bathroom and spit them out in the toilet. Just make sure you pretend to act stoned or they'll cop wise."

Impressed, Tate tipped his head. "That works?"

"Sure," smiled John. "I do it all the time. Taking that shit fucks you up. It's why more than half the people here just sit around staring off into space."

Tate looked around the room again. What John said was true: The majority of the patients were just sitting and staring. Or rocking. Or twitching.

"Company," John murmured then and tucked his little notepad under his leg.

A tall dark-haired man was approaching them. He looked to be in his early 40's. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and gray slacks. He didn't look like a patient but he wasn't dressed in the uniform of a guard or orderly either.

"Tate Langdon?" the man asked with a pleasant smile.

Tate shifted on the couch and folded his arms. "Yeah."

"I'm Doctor Ben Harmon," said the man in the black sweater. "I'd like to speak with you if I could."

He phrased it nicely but Tate wasn't sure it was really a request. He considered saying no just to see what the man would do but he decided to play nice for the time being.

"Okay. Sure," he smiled back.

"Would you join me over here?" the doctor said, motioning to a nearby table where there weren't any people sitting.

Tate didn't particularly want to sit on a hard wooden chair though. He looked around and oriented on a pair of armchairs near the upright piano where there wasn't anyone loitering about. "How about there?"

Dr. Harmon looked over at the setting and nodded amiably. "Fine with me."

Tate got up then and, making sure to hold his hospital gown closed, he headed over to the nearest of the two chairs and resettled himself there.

"How are you feeling, Tate?" Ben asked.

"Just peachy, doc," the teenager smiled. "How are you?"

"Doing well," Dr. Harmon responded with another smile. "I understand you've been seeing Doctor Thredson."

"Well, we're not going steady yet," Tate joked. "But I think he's going to give me his class ring soon."

He was rewarded with a small laugh from the doctor. "Funny. So you've been getting along well with him?"

"Yeah," said Tate, growing more curious about the man. Why'd he care so much about Tate's therapist? "He seems all right. Well. Except the fact that he had them shoot me full of dope and locked me in the 'seclusion room'." Suddenly reminded of the betrayal, Tate's smile drained from his dark eyes.

"I'd heard about that," Dr. Harmon admitted. "I understand it had something to do with your not wanting to be kept here."

Tate's expression darkened and he folded his arms over his middle. "Dr. Thredson said I'm stuck here until I get better but that there's no cure for what I have."

Ben was a little surprised at that fatalistic prediction and wondered if the patient was dramatizing it. "Well, perhaps you need a second set of ears to hear your situation," he suggested. "I find it hard to believe anyone who doesn't have a fatal disease is incurable."

"What, you want to shrink me too?"

The doctor smiled benignly. "You're Dr. Thredson's patient. But if you told him that you'd like to speak with me as well, I'm sure you'd be given the opportunity."

A thin line appeared between Tate's brows beneath his unkempt bangs. "You want me to ask him if I can see you?" His expression cleared into an amused grin. "I don't know, doc. I'm not sure if he's hip to swinging."

Ben laughed. "You might be right," he agreed. Then he got serious. "I think I can help you. I think we have a lot to teach each other."

"How's that?" Tate asked. He didn't really feel he needed help from anyone but the people who were offering seemed to be an unusual bunch.

"I understand you," said the doctor confidently. "I've had a lot of experience working with troubled young people. More than Thredson has. Hell, I was a troubled teen, once upon a time."

"Yeah?" Tate's curiosity was further tickled. He liked stories that began with 'once upon a time'. "I'm supposed to talk to Doctor Thredson tomorrow. I'll ask him about one of those, what-do-ya-call-em... group therapy things?"

"Group isn't necessary," Dr. Harmon smiled. "Just let him know you want to schedule some time with me. He'll know what to do to get that set up. I hope we can chat real soon."

Dr. Harmon got up then and, with a pat on the teen's shoulder, the man made his way out of the commons. Shelley followed him out.

...

As with the previous day, when the lunch hour rolled around Tate was taken back to his cell. He now understood why it had been so quiet the day before: Most of the other patients in the block he was in were at the cafeteria. He was stuck sitting in his locked room. He envied the freedom of the other patients but he doubted their food was any better since it all came from the same place.

He stashed all of his pills but the painkiller. While it hadn't cured his chronic headache, it made it a lot easier to ignore. The food was barely palatable but he choked it down anyway since he was hungry. When he was finished he inspected his backside again and found the swelling had gone down quite a bit. There were still some ugly bruises but they would fade. The worst was over.

With nothing else to do, he lay down on his bed. He wasn't tired but after a few minutes the codeine took the edge off his boredom. He thought about masturbating just to pass the time but it wasn't dark and he didn't want to risk getting caught again. That irritated him a little. He didn't like having his behavior dictated - especially not _that_ behavior.

He shut his eyes and tried to imagine what had been happening on Star Trek. He liked the show, even though the fight sequences were pretty cheesy. He liked the idea of speeding about the night sky in a space craft, fighting alien races and making out with alien chicks. Captain Tate Langdon had a certain ring to it. Captain Tate.

"Why did Captain Kirk piss on the clock?" he said to no one. "Because he wanted to boldly go where no man had gone before."

He chuckled, then he sighed. Only a couple of days in the bug house and he was already talking to himself. Not a good sign. He sat up and looked around the room but nothing had changed. There was still nothing to do. Nothing to read. Nothing to write.

Tate loved to read and write. That's what had gotten him through many hard times in his youth and kept him hanging on. It was through reading and writing that he'd found a conduit for the subjects that engaged him - and enraged him. He could fill up pages with the loathing he felt for much of humanity.

He thought about the people at the university, the ones he shot. They hardly seemed real. They were mostly shapes he'd seen through a scope and through a haze of drugs. Men and women. Alone and in clusters. They had no faces, no identities. Forty-two faceless injured people. Thirteen faceless dead people. He didn't have to know their names to guess that almost every one of them would only ever be remembered as one of his victims. They would be faceless to the rest of the world too.

An hour crawled slowly by before he was finally let out of his cell by two orderlies. He wasn't taken to the common room, though; they took him to the hydrotherapy room. The white older guy ran a bath in one of the deep tubs while the black guy ordered him to strip down. Tate didn't want to get naked but the orderly looked like he might do something about it if he didn't cooperate. The teen quickly weighed his options and the potential outcomes and decided to strip.

"Get in," the other guy told him once he was naked

The water was too hot when Tate got into the tub. It burned his feet. He didn't sit down. "Can you turn the heat down?"

"Sit," the big black orderly said without an ounce of sympathy.

"It's too hot," Tate insisted. "It's fucking steaming."

The man grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him down into the warm. Tate hollered and thrashed but that only made the other orderly come over and help hold him down. The water hurt his genitals and stung the bruises on his ass and thighs but he forced himself to hold still. After a couple of tense moments the men let him go.

Tate shifted a little, slowly bringing as much of his body out of the hot water as he could without bringing the orderlies down on him again. The white guy shoved a small bar of soap into his hand and told him to wash. When the orderly saw the blond youth start to lather up he and the black guy fell to chatting with each other.

While they talked Tate washed. He didn't pay much attention to what they were saying at first. Eventually he realized they were gossiping about the people in the facility. He found out the black orderly's name was Cecil and the white guy was Max, who had a thick Boston accent.

Tate learned from their conversation that there was a doctor at Briarcliff who had a limp and whom they believed was doing heroin. According to the men, there was also a fat female nurse in intake that was supposedly screwing patients in exchange for being set free. Tate heard about the 'hot chick' who'd been taken for 'full course' shock treatment and how that wasn't a bad thing because it would mean she wouldn't care if the orderlies fucked her. They talked about the 'head surgeon' and how he kept body parts in some basement laboratory. Neither staff member seemed to care that Tate was right there listening.

"I'm done," he said during a lull in their chat.

They inspected him and decided he'd done well enough. Max handed him a towel, which Tate took as he left the tub. The air was cool on his over-heated pink skin. He dried off starting with his hair.

"See?" Cecil said like he was talking to a child - a particularly slow child. "Doesn't that feel better? Cleanliness is next to Godliness and all that jazz."

Tate eyed him from the shadows of the towel on his head but before he said anything, John's words came back to him: _The best thing is just to pretend to go along with whatever it is they tell you. Kiss ass, be polite._

"Yeah," he agreed, forcing himself to smile. He moved the towel from his head to his back and scrubbed himself dry. "I feel better now."

Inside, he grated against agreeing with the man but the black guy seemed to like hearing him do it.

"Finish up," Cecil said, not in an unpleasant way. "Max has some clean clothes for you."

When Tate was done with the towel, Cecil took it from him and the other orderly surprised him by handing him a pile of gray-blue clothes. Not a gown; clothes. Underpants and everything. There were no shoes in the pile but there were some white socks. The orderlies both laughed at the way Tate's face lit up.

"Just like fucking Christmas," Max said.

"Thanks," Tate said as he accepted the pile of garments. He meant it, too.

He dressed quickly and fully, even though it meant getting his socks wet on the tile floor. It felt incredibly good to be clothed again. The outfit was a bit loose but it was a far cry better than the viewing gown he'd been living in the past couple of days. It made him feel more respected. More human.

Going back into the chaos of the common room wasn't so bad that time.

...

* * *

Author's Note:

I wasn't expecting Shelley to show up. She wasn't a character I was particularly interested in. But she sort of barged in there.

Both John and the hot bath were inspired by real life. Star Trek was really big in 1968.

So next chapter's the last one of this episode. In it we have more about the ladies of Briarcliff.


	6. Chapter 6 - Settling In

...

"Welcome aboard, Violet," said Monsignor Howard. "I'm so glad you've chosen to donate your time to our organization. Your family is an asset to our staff. I'm sure you'll do well here."

Violet beamed. She wore a demure black long-sleeved tunic dress and her hair pushed back under a black headband. She wanted to make a good impression and apparently she had. "Thank you, Father. So who is it I'll report to and when?"

"You start tomorrow, if like," the priest smiled. "Seven AM. You can speak to Sister Mary Eunice."

..

"We don't have many candy-stripers," Sister Mary Eunice told Violet the next morning as she watched the girl don an apron and hat. Contrary to the job title, the uniform was plain white like the rest of the non-Catholic staff.

"How many do you have?" asked Violet, making sure the hat was bobby-pinned down correctly. Her long hair was tucked back in a net, per Sister Mary's request.

"Just you." The nun paused, then brightened. "Oh and there's that bald fellow who does custodial work. But technically he's not a candy-striper. Just a volunteer."

Violet looked surprised. "Oh. Wow. Okay."

"Don't worry," Sister Mary hastily reassured. "We have plenty for you to do. Have you ever washed bedpans?"

Somehow that wasn't what Violet had imagined doing at Briarcliff when she decided to defy her father and offer her services to the asylum.

...

The next morning Tate was woken at 7:00 with the rest of the patients and led with them first to the bathroom then through an underground tunnel that connected the ward to the small cafeteria behind the main building. There they had to stand outside the serving line door for several minutes while the kitchen got ready for them.

Tate was positioned in line between an old black guy who kept cursing under his breath and Shelley. The elderly man's Tourette behavior fascinated him but it was difficult to stare too much because Shelley kept pinching Tate's butt. Though mostly healed, his backside was still tender and each time she did it, it made him jump.

"Hey!" he said, rubbing the latest pinched spot.

"I miss your hospital gown," she grinned.

"I don't," Tate said honestly.

Just then a young nun accompanied by a girl about Tate's age passed by. Both were carrying armloads of folded towels from the laundry facility down the hall. He made eye contact with the younger girl felt a thrill. She was cute and big-eyed; unafraid. She was real, he could tell.

Tate smiled at her. She smiled back. He wondered who she was.

"She's not so hot," Shelley said defensively, trying to get his attention again.

When the nun and candy-striper were gone from sight around a corner he looked back to the blonde girl. He looked her up and down. It was impossible to tell what her figure looked like in the shapeless institution dress.

"She dresses better than you," he grinned.

Shelley gave him a shove, light and quick. "Screw you. I never dressed like this when I was out." Then she softened and tried to press up against him. "Want to meet me in the hydrotherapy room after breakfast? I'll show you what I look like under these rags."

"Hands to yourself, Shelley," Carl, the orderly on duty, interrupted. "You know the rules."

She pouted at the man but he ignored her. He had a whole herd of unstable people to watch.

The line began to move then and Tate experienced his very first cafeteria meal at Briarcliff. It was a lot like being in grade school. There were long tables with attached benches bolted to the ground. The food was identical to what he'd been getting in his room.

Watching the other inmates eat was as bizarre as watching them sit around the common room. The developmentally disabled inmates were understandably messy in their earnest attempts to feed themselves but some of the patients were too high, too crazy or too zoned out to eat. Some played with their food. Some just ignored it. People who ignored their food often got it stolen from them while the orderlies weren't looking.

After breakfast came the pill line. He made sure to get in line behind John. He wanted to see - or not see - how the guy avoided taking them. Watching discreetly, Tate found it impossible to detect whether John took the pills or not. When he stepped away from the nurse's counter, Tate stepped up and said his name. The dumpy old woman behind the desk handed him a plastic dish of pills. He looked at them and then at the small cup of water she offered him to wash them down with.

As smoothly as he could , he popped all of them into his mouth at once and quickly tucked them into his cheeks near his back teeth. He sipped the water, doing his best not to actually get it on the pills he'd stowed. Then he hurried away from the window. He noticed John hadn't left for the bathroom yet so he hesitated to ask for release. Would it look suspicious to the staff if he went immediately from the pill line to the bathroom? But would the pills start to melt if he didn't?

He sat down at a table and pretended to cough, using the motion to spit the pills into his hand. A little while later the patients were gathered up and herded to the common room where Tate noticed John leave from almost immediately. The teen waited a minute or two then approached one of the orderlies near the door.

"Hey. I gotta piss," he told the guy.

"Make it quick," the man said with a slight nod to the doors that led out into the hall.

Tate ducked out and headed for the bathroom. He passed John on the way, who grinned at him. Tate smiled back.

In the bathroom he quickly disposed of the handful of sticky pills, flushing them away before washing his hands thoroughly. It was a shame to lose the painkiller but he didn't trust the other pills one bit.

He left the bathroom then and was intending on going back to the common room but he was intercepted at the doorway to the hydrotherapy room. Shelley pulled him in and, seeing the room, he let her tug him over to a spot near the open shower in the back of the room. She stuffed her tongue in his mouth and petted his chest.

Shelley broke the kiss then, just enough to whisper to him: "You want me to blow you?"

That was something Tate had never been asked before. A smile tugged one corner of his mouth. "Sure."

Amazingly the blonde girl dropped and opened the fly of his hospital-issued pants. She went to work with expert care and precision. It was his first time having a girl go down on him and while he wasn't particularly attracted to Shelley, she was available and obliging. And she was real good at what she did. She got him off quickly and he noticed vaguely in the afterglow that she even swallowed his cum.

"Someone's coming," Shelley whispered, jumping up.

He quickly closed his fly and tugged his shirt straight. Then orderly Max came in and he didn't look happy to see them there.

"You aren't allowed in here," he said disapprovingly. "Go back to the commons."

Tate headed quickly for the door while Shelley strolled a little more casually. She flirted a little with Max, who neither encouraged nor discouraged it.

Back in the common room, Tate sank into an arm chair. Shelley plunked herself in another one nearby. When he glanced over she was looking at him.

"You don't seem so scary," she observed.

He peered at her curiously. "What?"

She shrugged a shoulder. "I heard you were the clock tower shooter. That you're some kind of maniac. But you don't seem that dangerous to me." She leaned a little closer. "Why'd you do it?"

Tate gave her closer consideration, finding her mannerism curious. He wasn't sure if she was one of the hollow masses or a person of interest. He didn't think she'd understand but he figured he give her something to chew on anyway.

"I got sick of watching all the pressed-shirt Toms, Dicks and Harrys getting ahead. Watching the corporate meat grinder spew out homogenized, brainless assholes day after day. The school... it generated these... Mickey Mouse ear-wearing zombies that would just as soon spit on you as let you cross their paths."

He remembered a flash from that day: Looking out through the scope, sighting the next target. He felt nothing. At all. He didn't know why he felt nothing - then or in reflection.

"That's heavy," Shelley remarked, impressed. "Are you anti-War too?"

"Depends on the war," said Tate. He pulled his legs up into the seat and crossed them at the ankles. "I'm not big on what's happening right now but I would've been glad to fight in World War II or I. That's some serious shit right there."

"Did you shoot any cops? At the school?"

Tate wrinkled his nose and thought about it. He hadn't thought much about the people he'd gunned down. The ones he remembered best were the twin boys on the stairs and even they were just a brief snapshot in his mind's eye: A look of terrified surprise then just a bloody smear on the wall.

"I think one, maybe," he said, remembering a uniformed man hiding behind a white car. "I don't think he died."

"You better hope not," said Shelley. "People who kill cops don't survive very long in places like this."

"So do you fuck just about everybody?" Tate asked.

The blonde girl shifted a little, not sure whether she should be defensive or proud. "Just the guys I like."

"You ever have sex with a doctor?"

"Not here," she said. "The last place I was at, though, I screwed my shrink. He said he'd let me go if I did but the bastard just transferred me here."

"That sucks," Tate said. "I can't blame you for trying though. Hey. Do you know Harvey?"

"Yeah. Sort of. Why?"

"I haven't seen him in a while," said Tate with a little shrug. He looked around the commons but still couldn't find the guy.

"They're probably shocking him," Shelley suggested. "Maybe they got tired of him always saying how it's a government conspiracy that he's here."

"Maybe he's right," Tate grinned, unable to resist. "Maybe they're trying to shut him up."

"Funny."

Tate's smile dissolved to a grimace. His headache was coming back full-force and with it this time were various other aches and pains which he slowly associated to areas where he'd been shot. The exterior wounds were healed with new, pink scar tissue but deep inside they were still knitting.

"You okay?" asked Shelley.

"Yeah," he said. "Just a headache."

He decided he would keep the next painkiller he got and not flush it with the rest.

...

After the lunch pill line Tate felt better. Not completely improved but better than he had during the morning hours. But the painkiller left him feeling tired so he ended up spending an hour after the meal just laying on his cot in the ward. He didn't like that.

At the end of the hour an orderly came and got Tate to escort him to another meeting with Dr. Thredson. Grudgingly he went along. He would've been happier to be left to napping. After Max dumped him in a chair and left, Tate looked glumly across the desk at the psychiatrist.

"How are you feeling, Tate?" the man smiled a friendly smile.

"Tired," the teen said honestly. "The painkiller helps my head some but I still kind of hurt all over. But mostly I just want to sleep."

Given everything Tate was supposed to be taking, Oliver would've been surprised if his patient wasn't sleepy. The statement actually gave him some hope.

"When we saw each other last, you were rather upset," prompted the doctor.

"Yeah," Tate smiled ruefully. "Can you blame me? After the night I had?"

Thredson thought he had a point but he didn't highlight that fact. "What about now? Are you still upset about your situation?"

"Well, I'm not thrilled with it," said Tate. "But it is what it is, right?"

"Very pragmatic of you."

A nice attitude indeed. Beneath it Tate was still considering ways to get out of the hospital and where he might go if he managed to get out. "Thanks. Oh. Doc?"

"Yes, Tate?"

"There's this other shrink who asked me if it'd be okay if I started talking to him too."

"Oh?" Dr. Thredson was sure he already knew who it was.

"Yeah," Tate went on, watching the doctor like a hawk. "Dr. Harmon. He said he's done a lot of work with, um. Teenage fuck-ups like me."

"Did he?"

"Well, not in those exact words," admitted Tate. He smiled, dimples showing. "But close enough. So. What do you think?"

"I think you should do what you feel is in your best interest," said Oliver carefully, to clear the legal hurdle. Then: "But I feel that right now it might be better if you didn't overburden your schedule with new doctors and treatments."

"You think I should just see you?"

"I see nothing wrong with the present dynamic," the doctor verified. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Speaking as your court-appointed liaison I think you should avoid talking to too many people at once about the case. You never know who will say what to whom."

"Now who's the paranoid one, doc?" Tate grinned.

"I wish it were paranoia," said Oliver sadly. "But it's true: Some people are only in this business so they can get published. Yours is a very high-profile case. There will be... vultures who will want to attach themselves to you simply because they know they'll be in the history books."

Tate found the warning amusing and somewhat amazing. He'd done something worthy of history books.

_There's your immortality right there, mother._

"What about you?" he asked the doctor. "Is that why you're treating me? So you can get famous?"

Dr. Thredson smiled. He'd anticipated that question. "When I was first assigned to your case I had no idea why you were. I was randomly selected by the state. But I really do think I can help you deal with your circumstances. Perhaps Doctor Harmon does too but I believe you should consider that opportunity later."

"What if I go to trial instead?" said Tate. "Can't we tell them I just went a little nuts for a while but I'm feeling better now?"

The doctor gazed at him steadily through the thick lenses of his glasses. "Are you feeling better?"

He was, thanks to the painkiller; at least better than he had been doing without it. "I think so. Don't I seem better?"

"You seem calmer."

Tate smiled. "See?"

"But that's still a far cry from being fit to stand trial," said Oliver. "What are you going to tell a jury about what you did?" He paused and looked at the younger man. When Tate didn't say anything, he added: "We need to establish what your therapy goals are and what treatment options there are."

"Options?" Tate scoffed, folding his arms. "What options? I don't even have the choice whether to present myself for trial."

"There are choices," said Thredson with gentle patience. "I'll make sure you understand your choices before you make them."

"Doctor and babysitter," muttered Tate. "Now I know why they call this a paternalist group."

"What?"

"Paternalist group," Tate said, more distinctly. "The whole medical profession is. I used to think it was only one branch because that's the only one we ever had to deal with. On account of my brother being sick. But I've seen a lot since then and the whole thing's like one big daddy conglomerate of people telling you when to do things and what's best for you. "

"That's a... very interesting idea, Tate," said Oliver carefully. He put that down on his notepad then glanced through his previous notes to re-read what he'd written about the older brother. "Beauregard," he said. "He was in and out of the hospital a lot, wasn't he?"

"Yeah," said the young man. He shifted in his seat. It didn't hurt to sit any longer but the chair was far from comfortable regardless. "He had, uh." He patted his chest at the middle. "Upper respiratory problems."

"Right," said the doctor. "I'm sorry to hear that he passed so young."

"Yeah," said Tate. His expression had glazed over in a blank mask but his dark eyes held unspilled tears that broke the illusion of impenetrable stoicism. "Me too. He was pretty cool." He forced a smile that threatened to dislodge a tear. "You would've liked him. Everybody liked Beau. What's not to like, you know? He loved Star Trek. He liked Dr. McCoy the best. Maybe because he saw so many doctors."

"What about you, Tate?" Oliver prompted, seeing an opportunity. "Which character is your favorite in the series?"

"I don't know," he mused. "Maybe Captain Kirk. He kind of reminds me of the swashbucklers, you know? From the black and white films. Always leading the charge and getting the girl. What about you? I bet you like Doctor Spock."

"Mister Spock," Thredson corrected. "Doctor Spock's the fellow that tells the world how to raise babies."

"Oh." Tate blinked then grinned. "I guess you know your Star Trek."

"I've been known to watch an episode now and then."

"Have you seen it lately?" asked Tate, perking up. "What's happened?"

Oliver gave him a moment's regard, then smiled. "Last time, Spock, Kirk and McCoy beamed down to investigate an asteroid's surface and got waylaid by space-babes."

"Huh. When you put it that way it sounds like about a half dozen other episodes." Tate shifted again. "Can I have a cigarette?"

"Certainly."

This time the therapist just left the pack and lighter on the desk. Tate got up, got one and lit it and then sat back down.

"Now in regards to your therapy and treatment," said Dr. Thredson. "Briarcliff has a lot of opportunities for assistance. They have a wonderful Occupational Therapy program in the bakery. If you work there you will draw a small salary."

"You think I could get a job in the bug house bakery?"

"Well," hedged Oliver. "Not yet. But it's something to work toward. Right now I would like to continue to see you three times a week in personal sessions. I also want you to attend Art Therapy when it's available."

"Why?"

"Call it an exercise of imagination" said the doctor. "I'd like to see what you create."

...

That evening Tate ditched all of his pills except the painkiller again, stuffing the others into his mattress. Then just before lights out, Sister Jude came by with an orderly and a couple of security guards. All of the inmates in the men's ward had to stand out in the halls while their rooms were systematically 'tossed' for contraband.

If it weren't for the codeine, Tate would have been on edge, worried about the pills stowed in his bed. As it was, he just stood there and acted mellow. His room came up 'clean' which he didn't dare look relieved about while Sister Jude's critical eye was on him. He didn't even make eye contact with her beyond a brief glance to acknowledge her leaving his room.

Another of the inmates wasn't so lucky and after everyone was locked back in his cell, Tate lay on his bed trying not to hear the sound of that unfortunate man being subjected to Sister Jude's cane. It was strange having to hear it; being forced to intrude on a humiliating and personal moment. It was also somewhat disturbing knowing it easily could have been him instead.

He pressed his hands over his ears and tried to think of something else.

He thought back to the day in the clock tower.

He hadn't slept in over 48 hours, partly because of the pounding headache. When he had tried to sleep he kept thinking he heard people shouting or bells ringing or the television even though it wasn't on, so he'd stopped trying to sleep for a while. He hoped eventually being tired would overwhelm the pain and noise so he could sleep through the night.

Sleeplessness, the headache, the drugs... they'd made the actual shooting and the memory of it feel like a weird, distorted dream. It hadn't felt 'real' even when he shot the first people upstairs. He hadn't felt an emotional reaction to their injuries. They were targets that had been taken down.

All of them were like that, the victims. One moment they were little people, up and walking and living. A few bullets later, they were sprawled on the ground. No names. No faces. They were barely men or women. They were unwitting cogs in the government machine. Future recruits and nobodies that kept the capitalist machine going.

He must have fallen asleep because he woke again a couple of hours later when a man in the ward started screaming.

"What's the matter, Mort?" one of the other inmates called.

Nobody answered. The man just kept screaming. It didn't sound like he was in pain. There were no words; not even gibberish. It just sounded like he was yelling. The noise went on for several minutes before some of the other inmates started to complain and tell Mort to stop it. But he didn't stop. He kept right on screaming. Eventually a couple of orderlies came along and beat him with their nightsticks until he shut up.

On the one hand Tate felt kind of bad for Mort. If the guy was taking the drugs Briarcliff was doling out, it was no wonder he'd snapped. On the other hand, it was nice to have quiet once more after the orderlies finally shut Mort up.

Tate fell into a light sleep but kept twitching awake every time he would start to dream. The dreams were jarring because they started out with people yelling at him or Sister Jude telling him what to do and getting angry when he didn't do it fast enough. At times there wasn't even a dream to go with the noise. During bouts of fitful wakefulness he was uncomfortable as well. He was too hot underneath the blanket but too cold to be without it.

The whole experience left him grumpy and introverted the next morning. A morning codeine and some orange juice helped mellow him out by the time he got to the common room. He sought out John and bummed a cigarette. He didn't see Mort around anywhere.

He was about to remark on that fact when he saw an unfamiliar young woman escorted in by an orderly. She was in her mid-twenties and had short blond hair that still held a flip. She offered a timid smile to the man in the white uniform who left her standing there on the fringe of the big, busy room. Billie Dean Howard looked uncertain and overwhelmed by her surroundings.

In the background, the nun on the record continued to sing.

...

* * *

Author's Note:

End Episode 1. Roll credits. Etc.

A 'big daddy' is a thing from the _Bioshock_ video game series. In Rapture, the city where the game takes place, 'big daddies' are partnered with 'little sisters'. Little sisters are waif-like children who run around jamming needles into people to suck out their Essence. If you capture a little sister you can do the same thing to her. Big daddies look basically like giant old-timey diving suits and they thump around with the little sisters, guarding them while they harvest from bodies. It's a very different kind of horror game.

Also: Star Trek. Zachary Quinto, Chad's actor, also played Spock in the recent Star Trek reboot movies. Star Trek was very popular when it first aired so I couldn't resist a little in-joke or two with Thredson about the series.

Someone asked me not too long ago whether I was planning to do anything supernatural with this season. With the intro of Billie Dean, the psychic from Season 1, you now have your answer. Yes! There will be some supernatural stuff here and there.

Next episode: Let's explore **The System**, shall we? The twisted, corrupted, broken system. The system Violet's now volunteering for despite what Ben wanted.


End file.
